


Last Words

by PrettyArbitrary



Series: Stairway to Heaven [1]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Angst, Deathfic, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-21
Updated: 2012-09-21
Packaged: 2017-11-14 17:15:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,901
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/517629
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PrettyArbitrary/pseuds/PrettyArbitrary
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the end, John knew exactly where things had started to go wrong.</p><p>The first half of a double-fic collaboration between myself and <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/users/bendingsignpost">bendingsignpost.</a></p>
            </blockquote>





	Last Words

**Author's Note:**

  * For [TheMuchTooMerryMaiden](https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheMuchTooMerryMaiden/gifts).



> Written for the [gift exchange,](http://johnlockchallenges.tumblr.com) for a prompt from TheMuchTooMerryMaiden (aka [toomerrymaiden](http://toomerrymaiden.tumblr.com) on Tumblr):
> 
> "Our heroes are incarcerated somewhere. Basic needs (food, water) are met but there is nothing to do. Sex is off the cards (because that’s not where their relationship is up to or because they are not prepared to ‘perform’ for their captors). What do they do to keep each other entertained/stop each other from losing their marbles. Any rating."
> 
> I...nominally held to it.
> 
> Massive, Mount Everest, tectonic-plate-sized props to my betas, [thisprettywren](http://archiveofourown.org/users/thisprettywren), [persian_slipper](http://persian-slipper.tumblr.com), and [gelishan](http://archiveofourown.org/users/gelishan), without whom this flat-out wouldn't have gotten written. The word 'stalwart' is not sufficient to describe them.
> 
> Before you murder me for what you're about to read, I should note that there is a sequel/companion piece by [bendingsignpost](http://archiveofourown.org/users/bendingsignpost).

He doesn’t always need the cane, but he carries it because sometimes, when it gets cold, his right leg buckles. Gone are the days when it was psychosomatic. These days it’s arthritis.

It’s threatening rain today—in London, what a shock—and the knee has things to say about that, but John’s resisting the cane anyway. He’s 65, damn it, he’s not feeble. He can walk perfectly well, run when he needs to, carry things for the landlady.

So when he hears a woman cry out down a side street, nothing’s stopping him from running to her aid.

She doesn’t look wealthy, but she’s pretty, and John doubts that the three punks harassing her will stop with stealing her purse. He doesn’t shout a warning, just crashes into them. He drops one with a crack of his cane across the boy’s back; the second one goes staggering back with a punch to his solar plexus. The third one recovers from his surprise with a swing at John’s head. John tips off-balance when he dodges, and then he discovers Punk #2 didn’t actually go down when the kid’s weight slams into him from behind.

The woman is shrieking, but she’s got the presence of mind to clear off. She has her phone out. Good. Good on her. He could probably use some backup just now.

A foot blurs past John’s face, painting the world red as it impacts his side, and then there’s black.

The smell of the hospital creeps in on his dreams, as intimately familiar as the desert, the kitchen at 221b, or his ex-wife’s house. He wanders through all those places before he finally finds his way out to wake in the ICU. He's alone, but the bustling noise of the ward filters through his half-open sliding door. He's so tired he can't turn his head. There's a lightbox on the wall, holding several X-ray and MRI films. He stares at them and thinks, _I’m dying._

He opens his eyes again. He’s in a whole lot of absence-of-pain; the calling card of his old friend, the morphine drip. It’s got him feeling good, but he can feel the jagged, ugly shape of the damage beneath the cuddly blanket of drugs, like the edges of a deep hole. He doesn’t step in. At this point in his life, he’s over the need to court pain.

Nurses and staff come and go, poking and prodding and talking, slippery fish sliding through his memory. He can remember someone recounting his injuries, but it’s a bit like how Rebecca used to cook pasta—thrown at the wall and only some of it sticking. Mind you, there’s no missing the broken leg, and the broken ribs and punctured lung make themselves known on every inhale.

“Breathe deep,” they tell him. Fantastic. There’s life advice for you.

He’s in the ICU, and no one shows any inclination to move him out of it, which tells him everything he needs to know. There’s a shiver deep in his bones that, he remembers from his old shoulder wound, doesn’t bode well.

They must’ve called Harry. She should be here, except no, of course she shouldn’t. Work project in California. She has a different number there.

He should give them the right number...but that’s a hell of a long way to drag her. She’ll come back and waste days moping about here while all her work there comes undone. The idea of her hanging over him, fretting and fussing, or oh God, putting on a brave face while he does his best to lie about not feeling hurt and scared and alone...

He’s miserable enough by himself; he doesn’t need company. Someone to come sit with him who gets to get up and walk out of the room at the end. Even so, that vacant chair next to his bed feels peculiarly conspicuous. If he closes his eyes, he can just about sense a presence there, filling the room with a brooding, impatient silence rather than an empty one. Waiting for him to get up and follow.

It’s been a long time since he let himself linger over those days with Sherlock at Baker Street. He remembers it all so clearly; it’s so easy to sink back into those memories and not want to surface again. He opens his eyes before the sound of a violin can come back to him. Christ. One little brush with death and all the old ghosts get stirred up. Sherlock’s been dead for four years, and out of John’s life well before that.

“You never waited for me anyway,” he tells the chair.

“I waited longer than I should have.”

The jerk of surprise _hurts_. It takes a couple of heartbeats before John’s shocked muscles release him enough to turn towards the voice, and there she is, on his other side. She’s standing by the bed, arms folded and hands fisted against her elbows, visibly torn between crying and hitting and hugging him. She looks worn and beautiful and god, he’s missed that gorgeous coffee complexion of hers. Like touching sunlight. Just the sight of her is like a hug on a breezy summer day.

“Rebecca.” He flicks his fingers in a little wave. Why is she here? “Did they call you? I’m sorry.” His mouth doesn’t want to coordinate. He has to speak slowly to keep from sounding drunk.

“I was the last person you had listed as an emergency contact.” Her mouth is a thin, unhappy line. He fights down a bubble of pleasure; it’s more than a bit awful to be glad that she’s worried for him after the mess he made of their marriage. “You look like hell, John.”

He gives her a tiny twist of a smile. “Given how I feel, I’ll, uh.” Oh hell, he’s lost his words. The drugs are getting to him. Or maybe the concussion. “Um, yeah, compliment.”

She’s not impressed, he can tell from the way her chin twitches. He fights down a sudden urge to laugh. Words pop into his head: _we can’t giggle, it’s a crime scene._ Well, he feels like a crime scene right now. He supposes he is one, technically, but that’s not a joke she’d appreciate. “I could use a good laugh, though.”

Oh. He might’ve said that out loud, going from the way the concern etches deeper into her face. He watches her cycle through all the questions she doesn’t want to ask, and settle on the one she has to. “Did you really go after those men? By yourself?”

She’s so upset. She reached this point in the last year of their marriage, and now it takes her no time at all to get back to it. He hates it, and now he’s hurt her, again, when they’re both meant to have left this behind them. 

He shakes his head at her. Tries to. It feels like shaking a toppled bobblehead. “She needed help,” he says. It’s not only true; it’s the truth. “There wasn’t anyone else. I’m sorry.”

He’s sorry for so much when it comes to Rebecca, but he still doesn’t really know how to say it, after all this time, or even exactly what to apologise for. Rebecca’s dad was a fireman. She’s got limits on how much danger she can bear to watch her loved ones face. Does a man apologise for misjudging himself? It’s his fault, he knows; she simply trusted what he told her. And he’d believed he could outgrow this. Of course he can’t. Just look at him.

Rebecca shouldn’t be here. She has a family. New husband. A job. God, she should be teaching today.

She sighs, the tension draining out of her. “I know.” He watches her study him, watches her decide she’s too tired to feel more. He looks back at her, and tries to memorize the changes to her face since he saw her last. She might visit him again, but she shouldn’t, and somehow he doesn’t think he’ll see her again. “John...you should have someone here, you know. You shouldn’t be alone. Have you called Harry?” She knows he hasn’t. “You should call Harry. She deserves to know.”

He moves his head in what might be construed as a nod. The silence that ensues is awkward, and they look at each other, each hoping the other will break it.

“I never was much good at talking,” John finally admits, because she deserves to hear it. “I suppose I never really tried to get over that.”

“No,” she agrees sadly. “You never had to. He always just knew.”

He loses his breath for a moment, and it’s got nothing to do with the injured lung. They had their fights where she threw _him_ in John’s face, but she doesn’t mean it as a barb this time, and that hurts so much more. He tries not to let her see, just nods and lets her turn his head so she can kiss him on the temple in farewell. 

His eyes fall on the MRI hanging on the wall behind her. He falls asleep trying to work out what’s wrong with it.

“You know what’s wrong, John. At least you used to have the sense to listen to your instincts.”

John’s eyes pop open, because _that_ is a voice he never expected to hear again.

Sherlock is perched on the foot rail of John’s bed, his feet planted to either side of John’s, eyes gleaming irritably in the low nighttime light of the ward. The plastic rail can’t be very comfortable—or sturdy—but he obviously cares as little as he ever did. His annoyed growl reverberates in John’s chest. “You look terrible, but I don’t recall that the attack left you _blind._ ”

John gapes at him. This doesn’t feel like sleep, but there’s Sherlock, and that’s not possible. “You’re dead.”

Sherlock rolls his eyes and hops off the bed to pace. “Yes, John, obviously _my_ death is the big question at hand.” He looks...amazing. The way his long legs move, the graceful arcs his hands describe as he lifts them to gesture. That curl of hair flutters at his left temple with each stride. Every detail makes John feel like a man saved from dying of thirst. Sherlock turns to fix his eyes on John. His eyes. Oh Jesus, John thought he’d never see him again. He isn’t seeing him now, he knows this is impossible, but he doesn’t care. “You _do_ realize you’re dying?”

John sighs and nods. He’d suspected, but hearing it from someone else, he can feel the truth of it in his body. “Came just to deliver me the bad news, did you?” A little wave of sadness rolls through him. He wonders if he should be alarmed that it isn’t larger. Maybe it’s the concussion fucking with his emotions. Or maybe he’s just too damned tired to care about much anymore other than Sherlock’s ghost standing in front of him. “What about you, then, you wanker?”

“I’m where I’ve always been, John.”

John squints at him. “What the hell is that even supposed to mean?”

And then John is lying in bed in an empty, shadowed room, and he hasn’t opened his eyes because they weren’t closed. He raises his good hand to rub gingerly at his eyelids. Hallucination. Or opium dreams, maybe, but he was never prone to those.

_Bad. Bad sign._

The shivery feeling in his bones has grown. He feels strangely hollow, breakable in a way he’s never felt before. Once upon a time, he held a core of strength in himself that he could tap when necessary, but when he reaches for it now, it’s like grabbing cobwebs.

Hallucination or not, he believes Sherlock. John lies there, slightly elevated in his hospital bed with the automatic pressure mattress squeaking and shifting beneath him, and feels heat prick in his eyes without understanding why.

He should be afraid, or sad, or maybe even angry, but he’s not. He doesn’t know what he’s feeling. The ward lighting is turned down for the night, and the low mutters of staff mingle with the chirp and hiss of machinery into a quiet tapestry of sound that’s as familiar as crickets or late-night London traffic outside his window, and it feels like coming home, somehow. Why does that hurt?

He’s just seen Sherlock for the first time in fifteen years. Not the real thing, of course, but it’s still the closest he’s come. And Sherlock says he’s dying. He’s _right,_ and shouldn’t that hurt more than seeing Sherlock?

“I should tell someone,” John says into the silence, mainly to shake himself loose from that train of thought. It does feel a little better to hear a voice, even if it’s only his. But what’s he supposed to say? “‘My hallucination told me I'm dying. But that hallucination was Sherlock, so I’m sure he knows what he's talking about.’” Right. He can imagine the ward nurses being a touch skeptical.

It’s humiliating, the idea that he’d have to convince someone he’s dying. He doesn’t think he has enough strength left for it. He sighs and smiles wanly at the chair. “Rebecca was right. You really did spoil me.”

These walls are the last home he’ll ever have. He's more alone in this place than he's ever been, and all the more so for knowing that there's nowhere left where he belongs except this room, in this bed, waiting to fucking die, and he has not a single living soul he would want here with him.

He may as well admit it to himself: even fifteen years since John last laid eyes on him, it’s still Sherlock he wishes were standing here. Every bone of John’s body aches with that wanting; for that brilliant mind glittering behind brilliant eyes, for those sardonic sideways looks they’d share between them when the world was being ridiculous, for those devastatingly condescending quips whose subtext—to John at any rate—was, _This isn’t so bad. I could solve it in seconds._

Talking aloud seems to bring that presence back, so he gathers his breath and starts speaking again. “Never could imagine you in the country life, you know. I tried, when I heard you’d moved to Sussex, but all I could think of was you hunched over the kitchen table with an oxy-torch. Bet you didn’t get two months before you were gagging for another case. Lestrade told me you still put in some hands-off consulting work for him sometimes, if he asked nicely. I always wondered if your hair turned at all...” He’d looked for photos, every now and again, but Sherlock had dropped out of sight after John left. His hair was as dark as ever in John’s waking dream. Sherlock hadn’t looked a day older than the last time John saw him.

This is ridiculous, honestly. He should feel ridiculous, but he doesn’t. He feels as though he’s lifting stones off his chest one by one. “Did you ever miss me? I wondered sometimes.” John never let himself think about missing Sherlock much. Looking back, he’s not sure how he ever managed that. Or if he really did. In hindsight, his life feels defined by the absence of Sherlock. 

“Did it hurt?” he asks faintly. “Did it feel like this for you? I never meant to hurt you, you know. I didn’t mean it like that. I just wanted...” What? God, he doesn’t even know anymore. Going by his marriage, it seems like all he wanted was a pipe dream.

“I should’ve been there, shouldn’t I,” he finally whispers into the darkened room. “I should’ve, because if I had been, you wouldn’t have died. You should be here right now.” His laugh chokes off in his throat. “The _stupidest_ fucking way to die, Sherlock. Allergy to a bloody bee sting, of all things. For want of an epipen. Moriarty couldn't kill you jumping off a rooftop, but you couldn’t genius yourself a beekeeper’s suit with external pockets? Goddamit, I never could leave you alone.”

The thought of Sherlock, trachea swollen shut and suffocating far from help, knowing no one would find him in time... John wants to curl in on himself till he squeezes the world away. His injuries won’t allow it, so he just lies there and stares blankly at the ceiling till sleep takes him.

By the next morning, word must’ve got out about him, because a slow but steady trickle of friends and acquaintances begins to arrive, along with some flowers and cards from ex-patients and colleagues. The visitors are nice, even if they all start with a variation on the same theme: “Still chasing criminals at your age, John?”

"You'd chase criminals at any age," Sherlock says over Murray’s shoulder. This one’s just a figment of John’s imagination, because talking to Sherlock is nicer than lying in bed with nothing to do, which in turn is better than reading the latest Dan Brown Jr. thriller one of the nurses lent him. It’s driving him nuts that he can’t get Sherlock’s voice quite right, though. The hallucinations capture the resonance in his lower register, and that disdainful curl, but his imagination can’t. “I don’t know why you ever stopped.”

John glances at him but doesn’t reply till Murray leaves. No need to make a fool of himself in company. 

“It feels so wrong not to have you here,” he confesses once the room clears out. “I feel like you’ve claimed the chair for yourself and forbidden anyone else to sit in it.” He contemplates the chair, whose cheap padding remains pristinely unsquished. “Not that many of them have stayed long enough to sit.”

“For the best, John. They’re so tiresome. They all ask the same idiotic questions and stay just long enough to assuage their own fears of abandonment on their deathbeds.”

Unbelievable. John can’t decide whether he’s more pissed off at Sherlock or his own brain. "You're a figment of my imagination. Shouldn't you be less of an arse?"

"John, there is no version of me that is less of an arse."

For a few seconds, John forgets that this Sherlock is imaginary and glares at that smirking face. It’s blissful. “Believe me. I lived with you for ten years, it’s hard to miss.”

“And then you left.”

John sucks in a lungful of air that sets his broken ribs on fire. That cuts, and he is not having this conversation. He is not going to fight with his own bloody sock puppet. “I didn’t leave. You drove me out.”

“You left,” Sherlock insists, as though he weren’t a shadow of John’s imagination. “I never gave you anything but the truth, John. Ten years together and you threw me over for the first woman you could find who let you lie to yourself convincingly.”

“Nothing but the truth? That’s rich! You lied to me whenever it suited your purposes.” No, what is he doing? Sherlock isn’t even real. He’s having an argument with himself. His subconscious is such a fucking bastard. There’s more than one reason it comes in the shape of Sherlock. “Shut up,” he tells himself. “Just shut up, you don’t need this.”

“Yes,” Sherlock sneers, in a perfect facsimile of that drawl that could cut glass. “You’ve spent the past twenty years not listening. Why start now?”

“Fuck off!” John snaps, and then starts coughing because his ribs really aren’t up to managing full volume just now.

“You didn’t give a damn about me,” Sherlock continues inexorably. “You never cared to hear a word I had to say about it, or to even discover what I really felt about the whole thing. So much easier to declare me jealous and then swan off as the injured party. And yet I was right, wasn’t I? Look at yourself, John. What do you have to show for your life? You left me for a marriage that failed just as I warned you it would, a career that took a bullet in the shoulder, and a gaping emptiness where fulfilment should be.” Sherlock cants his head to look down the ruler-straight line of his nose. “Oh, yes, and a best friend you betrayed and abandoned to die.”

Sherlock’s voice rumbles through John’s head till it blots out everything else. It’s bullshit and he knows it. How the fuck could he figure out what Sherlock felt when the man wouldn’t give him anything but flat stares and evasions every time he tried? He’s spent every day since Sherlock’s death arguing back the guilt in his head, but oh, he can’t do that now, can he, not when it’s using _that_ voice. He can’t _not_ listen to it after all the years he’s ached to hear it again.

He’s shaking, he notes distantly. Somewhere outside him, there’s shouting and rushing and the angry beeping of machines, but he needs desperately to get out, get away from this room, and he can’t even sit up. He’s being stabbed in the chest, and it’s so fitting that he doesn’t realize he’s sobbing till the nurse’s determined voice cuts through his private chaos, insisting that he calm down, calm down!

A mask comes down over his face and frankly, he’s grateful for the oblivion.

He has no idea how long it’s been when he wakes again, but he feels like he’s descended to a slightly worse layer of hell than he occupied previously.

He’s wearing an oxygen mask. There’s an irritating, invasive presence burrowing into his left side which, upon investigation, proves to be a chest tube.

“Tension pneumothorax,” Sherlock says from over by the lightbox. “You went into cardiac arrest. It won’t be long now, though I suspect you’ll insist on being stubborn about it. Why stop now, after all?” His voice resonates in the room as crisp and clear as if he were truly here. Hallucination, then. Besides, his bedside manner is worse than John could bring himself to imagine.

John turns his head enough to see him from the corner of his eye. He wants to retort, _How the fuck would you know?_ but his voice is a blurred mutter through the mask.

Sherlock shrugs in response anyway. “The mind is capable of amazing feats, John. Your association with me should have taught you that much.”

John’s honestly not sure he wants to talk to Sherlock right now, after the way the last time went.

Sherlock scoffs. “That was hardly my fault, John. You worked _yourself_ into that state.” Which makes no sense, John reflects. Sherlock’s a figment of his imagination regardless of whether he’s a hallucination or a daydream, but that logic doesn’t seem to faze Sherlock. He walks over to lay a chilly hand on John’s chest. “Right now, if you don’t have something to distract you from the monotony, you’ll go mad, which would be both pointless and supremely irritating. You should be grateful I’m here.”

John stares at him. He can’t feel anything—not gratitude or anger, no grief that he’s dying, not even pain. All he can do is look at Sherlock and _yearn._

Sherlock smiles at him, the special small soft one he never used for anyone but John, and John feels his heart shatter into a million pieces.

“It’s all right, John,” Sherlock comforts him. “This will be over soon.”

From inside the mask, John smiles back.

He wakes up again, probably. He’s not sure, because he’s pretty certain he remembers people coming in and doing things, but one of them may have been Mrs Hudson and there was definitely body armour involved. It wasn’t even purple. He’s dead certain she’d never wear body armour that wasn’t purple.

Sherlock, on the other hand...he’s leaning with arms crossed on the foot rail. 

_You really shouldn’t do that,_ John tells him, or maybe just thinks it since he’s still got the oxygen mask on. _These beds aren’t meant for that._

Sherlock grins conspiratorially. “I don’t weigh anything.”

Oh. Right.

Sherlock looks fantastic. Much better than John would’ve expected after he retired and died. You’d think that would put lines on a man’s face.

“You look just the same as you did at Lestrade’s retirement party,” John tells him. It seems possible that Sherlock hadn’t noticed. 

“That’s because it’s the last time you saw me.”

John nods. That would explain it. It was the first time they’d been in the same room in a couple of years. They’d done their best not to cross each other’s paths directly, but that sonorous voice had carried through the room and clutched at John’s heart every time Sherlock spoke.

He’d still been so angry, then. He’d still been with Rebecca, still telling himself it was Sherlock’s fault.

“You didn’t come to my funeral,” Sherlock notes.

John squeezes his eyes shut. He has nothing to say on that subject. “You didn’t come to my wedding.”

“You shouldn’t have got married.”

“You shouldn’t have died twice.”

Sherlock’s considering hum vibrates through the room. John can’t look at him. It all started with Sherlock’s stunt. Then he’d been gone, and John had had to ask himself what kind of fucking life he had, and the answer, without Sherlock, had been, “Not much.”

And so he’d set out to build a life of his own, only apparently he’d never been meant to.

“I suppose that makes us even, then,” Sherlock says with a smile that doesn’t reach his eyes. Not that most of his smiles ever did. 

“Maybe it does,” John agrees. “It seems we finally managed to kill each other.”

“In a manner of speaking, yes.” Sherlock rests his chin on his crossed arms. “I suppose we did.”

The dull weight of Sherlock’s agreement makes itself right at home amongst the other agonies in John’s wrecked chest. “I couldn’t go to your funeral,” he blurts out, because it’s something he’s wished he could explain to Sherlock ever since he missed it. “I tried, but. I couldn’t make it out the door. I kept remembering the first time, you know, and how you came back, and...I couldn’t stop wishing you’d just get back up. I’d have been sitting there the entire time, thinking that: ‘Please get back up,’ and...I never told you. I was going to tell you. We came so close to fixing it, Sherlock. I was going to visit you, and I was going to tell you—I am _so sorry._ But then you went and died on me, like an _idiot,_ and...you always have to have the last word, don’t you. I said once you’d outlive God to get the last word in, but it’s a lot easier to die before anyone else can say anything, isn’t it?” The words scrape against the sudden anger in his throat. He’s carried this for so long, and he can _never say_... “So fine! Fine, Sherlock. You win. Congratulations, the last word is yours, forever. I hope that makes you happy.”

Sherlock blinks slowly at him. “You’re an idiot.”

John’s laugh is a broken thing. “I know. _God,_ but I miss you.”

It’s a while later. John’s not sure when. It’s stuffy in the hospital tent, even with the air conditioning, and when Murray or the lads aren’t visiting, everything blurs together into boredom and morphine and the bottomless agony of his shoulder. But Sherlock’s still here, sitting on the side of his bed, one soothingly cool hand splayed on John’s chest.

“Sometimes I want to tear the bandages off and see if my shoulder is still there,” John confides.

Sherlock cocks a coolly amused eyebrow at him. His eyes are smiling, though. John can’t blame him; he must be a real pip on painkillers. “I assure you it is. I can see the outline.”

“Huh.” John tries turning his head to see for himself, but his head doesn’t really want to go. “Is my neck still there?” he asks in some concern.

Sherlock laughs. “Yes, John. Your head is still securely attached to the rest of you.”

“Good.” John smiles at him. “You make sure it stays there, right? I think I need a nap.”

He thinks he feels fingers stroke across his forehead. They feel wonderful in the heat. Sherlock always had cold hands.

“I kept tabs on you, you know,” he announces with some delight when he wakes again. “I’d follow the news and put together what you’d done. And I’d hear from Greg or Mrs Hudson, sometimes, and they’d tell me how you’d been doing. And I read the case notes you started posting on your website.”

“My unsolved cases,” Sherlock agrees, resting his chin on his crossed arms. “I started posting those for you, you know. In case you might be moved to comment.”

John hadn’t known, though a part of him had hoped. He smiles, feeling oddly shy. “You know, I did see something, with that case about the smuggled ivory. But I went to the coast with Rebecca’s family, and by the time I got up the nerve to contact you, you'd already solved it." He catches Sherlock’s eyes. “You never really needed me.”

“No,” Sherlock says. “Not for the work. But it was never as much fun without you.”

For a while, he’s lucid enough to remember that Sherlock is a hallucination. He spends a good deal of this time talking to someone who is probably a nurse, but might possibly also be the Devil. He comes away fairly certain that his immortal soul is still intact.

“You don’t believe in immortal souls,” Sherlock reminds him.

“True,” John agrees. Sherlock is in one of his energetic moods, pacing till John is just about prepared to climb up the IV hanger and hang from the ceiling, barking. He’s now done approximately one million turns around the bed, muttering to himself, and if he keeps this up he’s going to end up cutting a hole in the floor for John to fall through. He seems to be counting or something. John’s not sure what he’s up to, but then it doesn’t need to make sense, does it? He’s not real. But he’s here, and John is happy.

After a little while, he breaks the comfortable silence. “Sherlock.”

Sherlock turns to look at him, brows raised in query.

John smiles ruefully. “I suppose I can say it now that you're dead and you can't hear me. You were right about Rebecca. What a mistake that was.”

He watches Sherlock’s face crinkle in glee. It’s almost worth it just for that. He looks like he’s barely restraining himself from some sort of idiotic dance. “I did tell you, John.”

“Yes, you did,” John agrees complacently. Why not? It can’t hurt anyone now, and it’s made Sherlock smile. “You told me from the beginning, and I didn’t listen, and you were right all along.”

He’s proud of himself for confronting that so calmly. So it’s a bit of a shock when, the next time he wakes up, he finds himself in the midst of shouting. “-take the blame, when you drove me away! I _tried,_ you insufferable wanker! I wanted to talk about it, I _asked_ you to be honest with me, and all you did was give me that blank fucking look— _yes, that one right there_ —and do everything you could to lock me out!” He glares at Sherlock, not even quite sure what’s got him tearing strips off his hallucinatory friend, but buggering _hell_ it feels good. “Well? Nothing to say for yourself?”

Sherlock might as well be a statue.

“Yeah,” John snarls with vicious satisfaction. “There it is. It's not like you couldn’t have called me, either. Anytime. You knew where to find me. And don’t feed me that bullshit about jealousy. You _were_ jealous. It poured off you so thick a blind man couldn’t have missed it. You could’ve compromised, if you cared so much. If you knew I was going to be so _wrong._ I didn’t want you to leave! A real friend would’ve stayed to pick up the pieces!”

He hates himself instantly for that last jab. It’s a deliberate knife aimed straight at Sherlock’s heart, and the only solace he has is that Sherlock isn’t really here to hear it. John turns away from that cold stare. It makes him want to hurt something, but there’s only Sherlock, and he’s sick to death of hurting Sherlock.

He thinks there’s an interval of sleep, but it’s all started to blur together from one moment to the next. Sherlock is the only thing that stays more or less constant. At least, John can always count on him to be present, even if details vary slightly from one conversation to the next.

“Sherlock.”

“Yes, John?”

“Why do you have wings?” He does; great beautiful black ones the same colour as his old coat. John fancies they would spread out the same way if he jumped.

“Well, you always thought I could fly.”

There’s a fuzzy grey blur of maybe-consciousness, and then John finds himself giggling. He rolls his head around till he spots Sherlock, who is sitting in his hair, eyes narrowed suspiciously at the ridiculous sounds coming from John’s mouth. “What?”

“You.” John sniggers at Sherlock’s expression. “The way you. You tripped the bee fantastic.”

Sherlock leans over the bed to look straight down at him. John is pretty sure he’s studying John’s brain through his skull. John is pretty sure he’s decided John has lost his mind. God help him, he’s missed that look.

John stares back at him, wide-eyed and solemn, till they both break down in gales of undignified, snorting giggles. John’s not sure what he’s laughing at, but laughing with Sherlock again is like having his heart glued back together.

The next time John surfaces, it’s back to full consciousness, and he knows that it’s time.

“Sherlock?”

The gravity in John’s voice catches Sherlock’s attention. He turns away from the door. “Yes, John?” His voice is a touch flat. After listening to hallucinatory Sherlock for so long, it’s a better approximation of Sherlock’s real voice than John had been been able to manage before, but he’ll still never get it quite right.

That thought strikes him as sad, suddenly, because this is the last time it’ll ever matter.

He has things he wants to say to Sherlock, but since he can’t have Sherlock, a figment of him will have to do. “I need to tell you this. I need to say it, at least, even if it’s to...” He shrugs as much as he can, with the way they’ve got him taped up.

“I never wanted to choose between you and Rebecca. You know that. I told you that.” He huffs a bitter laugh. “I _begged_ you. You...I would never have left you if you hadn’t made me go.”

Sherlock sits down next to him on the side of the bed, fixing John with eyes that nearly glow with his purity of focus. 

It’s killed John over and over again, through the years, to know he would never see that look again. He blinks a couple of times. His eyelids feel sticky from dehydration. “I was _so angry,_ ” he says quietly after a moment. “It seemed like all you ever did was leave me. What could I do? She was all you left me with. What did you _expect?_ ” His voice cracks so he’s forced to pause, fighting it back under control.

“Liar,” Sherlock says softly. “You chose her, John. You married her.”

John stares at him. “Well, I couldn’t marry _you._ ”

“No? Why not?”

John opens his mouth, then closes it again, because there’s a deep place inside him that doesn’t know what they were, or what they might’ve become, but it knows the pull toward Sherlock is like nothing else he’s ever had in his life. “Because...we weren’t like that.”

“How do you know?” Sherlock leans in, swallowing John’s personal space. “You didn’t try. You chose her.”

“I... Goddamn it, Sherlock! I _needed a life._ I couldn’t just hang around indefinitely, waiting for you to vanish on me again!” No, that’s his guilt talking. He already admitted he made the wrong decision, and they’ve all been paying for it ever since. He grits his teeth and breathes through his nose. Though...he doesn’t, really, does he? He can feel his body failing to respond to the orders he’s giving it.

It’d taken John years to realize. It isn’t fair to either of them, that he hadn't known how to articulate it when talking would still do any good, but when he lost Sherlock for the first time, he hadn’t been able to lie to himself anymore. Somewhere along the way, he’d rebuilt himself with Sherlock at his core, and once he’d seen what would be left of him when Sherlock was gone, he couldn't spend the rest of his life knowing that was coming. Not for a second time.

Sherlock might not have known. John’s never been sure. That’s what Sherlock does, after all: sees the clues and reconstructs the scene. But he hadn’t been there for the ‘before’ of this, and he’d removed himself from the ‘after.’

“Did you ever try, Sherlock? Did you ever try to understand what I went through? I suppose it wouldn’t have changed anything, but it would’ve been nice to know I was worth the effort.” That’s unfair. He knows it was never because Sherlock didn’t think John was worth it. If Sherlock didn’t look, it was because he didn’t want to know the answers any more than John did.

Sherlock doesn’t answer. John can’t tell if he’s surprised or simply has nothing to say. He sits, unwavering and unreadable, and John draws strength from that just as he always has.

“No, you’re right,” he says at last, with a little nod to Sherlock. “I did choose her. The first time I lost you, Sherlock, you took everything that mattered most to me along with you. I never could come to terms with that. And you know, I was so pissed off at you about that. Because,” he can’t tell if the shudder in his voice is emotion or his lungs failing. “Let’s not pretend you didn’t have your say. You pushed and demanded everything you could get me to give you, and then tried for a little more. And I always gave it, I know. That’s not what... It was _after,_ when I realized...I hadn’t left anything for myself, and I needed. Something stable.” No—that’s the acceptable lie. Rebecca deserves honesty for what he did to her. “I needed something that wasn’t you. Something I could keep for myself, something that couldn’t hurt me so much. That’s why I married her. Because I didn’t want you to leave me alone again. And I was _wrong._ ” The word twists in his throat, caught on old pain he’s never been able to swallow. 

“And you made sure I knew it, didn’t you? You made sure I was perfectly clear on how wrong and _stupid_ and selfish I was being.” Bitterness wells up into laughter. “But it wasn’t just me, was it, Sherlock? Because you made sure I couldn’t fix that mistake once I realized I’d made it. You shut me out. After everything we’ve been through together, everything you _put_ me through, you didn’t think I was worth a second chance.

“And you were right, weren’t you? Oh, you were so very right, it must have made you _so happy_ when I discovered that every word you’d spoken to me was true.” His throat burns like acid, raw with grief and intubation. “And you know, it’s all right. Because I had it coming, didn’t I? Because I betrayed you. You chose me, you put your faith in me, and then I ran away. I abandoned you and I left you all alone.” He never had to wonder if Sherlock ever looked for anyone else. For him, it’d been John or no one at all, and John had spent a long time trying not to know that Sherlock would go right on making that choice and waiting for John to catch up. John smiles a brittle smile and closes his eyes. “God. What a mess I made.”

Sherlock lays his hand on John’s chest, warm and inexpressibly comforting. He shouldn’t be able to touch, he’s only in John’s imagination, but... John doesn’t care anymore. He’ll take anything he can get.

“I don’t know what we were supposed to be, Sherlock,” he whispers. “And neither of us will ever find out, because I gave it all away. I made that choice for you, I took it away from you, and I’m so sorry.”

He opens his eyes and Sherlock is standing stock still over him, one hand on John’s bandage-swathed chest, eyes gleaming with their own wild light. John smiles at him—a real one this time, not the brittle savaged thing he wore before—and rests his hand over top of Sherlock’s.

“That’s all I have to say,” he murmurs. “I think...I need to sleep now.”

The pain in his chest is gone, so he breathes as deep as he can, and then sighs it out. He drifts off as the steady chirp of the heart monitor becomes the pure tone of a flatline.


End file.
